If you want an actual explanation: I am a woman and this does not match with my lived experiences. In fact, the article seems to dehumanize women in a lot of places. I'm really tired of the incel narrative and the sorts of moral arguments that come along with articles of this type in the comment section. Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out. I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez.
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
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To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial. See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre. It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. In fact, it only briefly pretends to be a data driven piece by including a graph at the beginning and citing an informal social media poll. It might be something interesting to discuss, but in my opinion this is not the forum for it.
Edit: And to clarify, lots of science can be political, but that doesn't make it not-science. For example, breaking news about a new discovery in climate change projections is inherently political but it is also inherently interesting from an intellectual standpoint. Something purely political and not intellectually interesting to hackers might be news about what's happening in the White House right now. In my opinion, anything that falls under the science category is fair game for this community because plenty of people who are hackers are also very interested in science and technology.
How so? It's not about political decisions one way or another but observing a new phenomenon on the market for sex and relationships. There are tons of scientific angles available for approaching the issue. Why is this happening? What has changed? What factors can contribute?
Flagging comments such as "that's good, all sex should happen in a marriage anyway" would be contributing to the discussion, flagging the entire topic would not be.
> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I feel like this is on-topic? I feel that the flag button is not there for "I found this uninteresting", because at any given time a significant portion of the articles on the front page are uninteresting to me. I don't go around flagging those because I'm sure others do find it interesting and it's possible to have a valid discussion about it without devolving into flamewars.
> See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre.
FWIW, this was not covered by Hacker News.
I swear everyone I have ever conversed with that believes that attractive men were monopolizing all the women was a 2 with a really negative attitude towards women.
The best part is where they diss the kind of woman they actually COULD potentially date as fat or dumpy and ergo beneath them.
My theory is its a perception and attitude problem not societies problem. The internet shows them an entire planet full of women that are out of their league and they fail to chase the people who actually could be their mates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601799
I know it's basically part of the language at this point, and I'm definitely guilty of it too, but really, it's dehumanizing and implies a static unchanging nature to attractiveness that really isn't there.
Women aren't the borg. We're a collection of individuals, each with our own personal preferences, which can and do vary wildly from the personal preferences of other women.
> I'm really tired of the incel narrative
Men generally play a numbers game, where their romantic overtures get rejected most of the time. It doesn't help that a lot of the time their romantic overtures are annoying [1]. Supposed "incels" just have no idea what it is that makes them so obnoxious [2].
Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting.
> Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out.
Maybe the comment section on these types of articles 'stress you out' because you see a bunch of men debating their "flat earth" theories of how women go about relationships, you can tell that their theories are clearly wrong, but there's no point in even trying to expand their 'flat earth relationship' theories?
Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate.
> I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez.
Interpersonal relationships can be hacked too. Women especially need constructive strategies to better deal with unwanted overtures from the other gender.
I try to provide constructive comments on the topic. This comment was about how my passengers helped me figure out "attraction": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906 (this one got lots of upvotes and downvotes). For the record, I never hit on my passengers, but sometimes they were intrigued by me...
[1] "As a woman, is it simply 'understood' that you’ll have to contend with inappropriate male advances & suggestive language?" - https://www.quora.com/As-a-woman-is-it-simply-understood-tha...
[2] my comment ending with "Relationship coaching for men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503
[3] "But around the time I turned 29 or 30 I rapidly began to lose interest in sex." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602351
This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about.
> Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate.
The stress has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. BUT, since you brought it up, OkCupid had a pretty detailed analysis that showed much the opposite when it comes to the age that people are interested. Linking because you might be interested, not because it's relevant.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*q95i3Ma24k-hxBtK....
https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...
> > Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting.
> This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about.
There are more nuances than I allowed. Sorry. I will try to refine my presentation to make it less harmful and simplistic. The narrative is based on Ingo Swann's observations (as told in his book [0]), my own conversations with women, and my own experiences.
> BUT, since you brought it up, OkCupid had a pretty detailed analysis that showed much the opposite.
I think your link confirms what I said (perhaps less than gracefully) about how women figure out what kind of relationships they're interested in at a later age than men [edit: 'sex drive', as used by the other commenter, is the term I was looking for. Women's sex drive tends to peak at a later age than men's]. I have a friend (now 62) who told me about going to classes at a community college in her 30's, and how she was giddy about all the boys, but that she never acted on it...
[0] The original webpage for Psychic Sexuality: https://web.archive.org/web/20060214070448/http://www.biomin...
Swann's estate has republished the books: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/psychic-sexuality-the-bio-p... / https://ingoswann.com/author
